Truth and Love

I want to love the way Jesus loved. I want to pull the planks out of my own eye before I look at the specks in other people. I don’t want to cast judgment or throw stones. But I also want to be on the side of truth. People, and this crazy culture we live in, make that a tricky balance.

A family in our city is suing their school district for not allowing their transgender child—a boy, with male anatomy—to use the girls’ restroom. The child is six. SIX!! According to the newspaper article I read, he—and I will continue to call him a he because that’s what simple biology says he is, no matter that he wears dresses and hairbows—started “expressing himself as a girl” at 18 months. I remember 18-month-olds. Mine expressed themselves by poking Cheerios up their noses and drawing on the walls with my lipstick. They also threw fits, hit other kids, pulled the dog’s tail, and stole candy from Walgreens. Like most every parent, instead of deciding this is who my child was—a thief, a bully, an animal torturer, or a psychopath—my husband and I worked hard to steer their behavior in other directions. We didn’t let them choose their clothes, their friends, their food, their religion, or their political affiliation at 18 months.

But gender is a whole other issue today. It’s close-minded, bigoted, ignorant, and just plain mean to question someone’s gender confusion today. Probably the very term “gender confusion” just marked me as an uniformed, bullying religious zealot.

I don’t know what it’s like to raise a boy who wants to wear dresses and play with Barbies. I’m all too familiar with raising girls who only want to wear “boy shorts” and play in the dirt, but I realize that is different. I don’t personally know people dealing with gender confusion in young children, and I don’t know for sure what I would do under those circumstances. I do feel compassion, and I hope that if I ever meet someone in that situation, I’ll be a loving friend. I also think the parenting issue looks different when the child is a teenager, capable of making his or her own choices.

But when do we rise up and say, “An 18-month-old with a penis is a boy, and he should be treated as such”? What about a 6-year-old? Is it the best use of his parents’ efforts to be fighting for access to the girls’ bathroom? Are they doing all they can for this child by suing the school—a school which has, by the way, offered him his own private bathroom in the nurse’s office any time he needs it? When do we rise up and say little girls shouldn’t be bullied by lawsuits into sharing school restrooms with boys?

Truth and love. They can and should coexist. To love like Jesus loved, we don’t have to compromise or deny truth. The Bible tells us, “Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church” (Ephesians 4:15). That brings me peace. More than being right, more than winning a culture war, more than being politically correct, I want to grow more and more like Jesus. 

Killing My 'Self' with Paul and Lewis

You know that whole biblical idea of dying to self? That line Paul writes in Philippians 1:21, “to live is Christ, to die is gain”? I’ve always struggled with that. Is it OK to admit that I kind of like myself? Self-preservation is hard wired into me, and the idea of “killing” that self has always seemed confusing and unattainable to me. I’ve sort of figured out that it means not serving my selfishness, putting others ahead of myself, and following the Golden Rule, but those things are definitely not the “natural” me.

Who is my true self, anyway? Am I trying to find it or will it to die? What about all those people who are on a quest to “find themselves”? Is that a noble pursuit? And what are they going to do once they find themselves?  

C.S. Lewis has some revealing thoughts on such things. They come at the very end of Mere Christianity. I’ve written before about my pathetic attempt, at age 19, to read this book. I gave up about five pages in, convinced all the Lewis fanfare was a bit over the top and it just wasn’t for me. It was tempting to think, when I recently picked up the book again, that C.S. Lewis had really come a long way. “He’s so much more accessible now. His writing has really improved,” I thought for a second. But of course it’s not the writer who changed but the reader. Thank God that it’s me who has come a long way!

Hear what Lewis has to say about dying to self.  

The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. [I don’t know about you, but there’s a lot about my heredity and upbringing that I’m happy to “kill.”]

What I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts. . . . I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike are all the great tyrants and conquerers; how gloriously different are the saints. [I like that a lot.]

Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. 

That last part is hard to accept. Most people won’t buy it. We kinda like ourselves. But the longer we spend really getting to know ourselves, the deeper we understand who we are, the more honest we have to be about what’s inside. There’s some good, for sure, but there’s also loneliness, hatred, despair, and decay. That’s what I am happy, eager, grateful, to kill. And when I do, I am filled with the wholeness—the love, hope, and fullness of joy—of Christ. To live is Christ, to die is gain. Yeah, Paul, I get it. 

Small Investment, Big Pay Off

Around this time last year I did something I’ve never done before. I tracked down a prisoner and wrote her a letter. I had followed her story in the local paper for months. She was a veteran and a very young single mom who, in a moment of stupid, selfish neglect, accidentally killed one of her babies. Normally, I would read a story like this, feel sick, and be glad she was getting what she deserved, which was a whole lot of jail time. Instead, all I felt was sympathy and compassion.

It reminded me of all the stupid, selfish things I’ve done as a mother. I can’t remember ever jeopardizing my kids’ lives, but I’ve certainly allowed some things that could have turned out badly while I sat with my back turned at the computer or hid out in a locked bathroom for five minutes of alone time. All I could think was, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Yet reading the online comments about this woman was like attending a modern-day stoning. And here critical, judgmental me had no stone to throw. Weird.  

I thought about writing to her dozens of times, but I never got around to it. It seemed like too much work to track her down, and besides, what would I say? But as the months went on, I felt the prompting to write her getting stronger and stronger, until I knew I needed to at least try. So early last February, I used my remedial internet skills to see what I could find. I landed on the Department of Corrections site, only to learn that I didn’t have enough information to get beyond the first step. I tried a few times, but no luck. Days passed. I tried again. Nothing. I decided to forget about it, but the nagging thought continued. In mid-February, I tried again, and this time, all sorts of information popped up, things like her middle name, her prisoner number, her location, and the history of her transfers to different facilities. I sort of felt like I was invading her privacy. Then I saw her birthdate. It was February 29, 1988. She was a leap-year baby, and it just so happened she would be celebrating her “sixth” birthday in a few weeks. (As my friend Nate says, “Oh, God, you have fun with your kids.”) Now I knew what I would write.  

Side note: You don’t realize how singularly minded birthday cards are (“Whoop it up!” “Party all night!” “Eat more cake!”) until you’re trying to find one for someone in prison. I finally landed on a “thinking of you” card.

My mom, who knows about such things, told me I couldn’t send anything in the letter. If I sent pictures or stamps or even a bookmark, it would probably be confiscated by the prison guards. She also warned me that the letter may not reach her at all. Using an address I was only about 50 percent sure of, the kids and I prayed over the birthday card and dropped it in the mail about 10 days before the birthday.

Weeks passed, and I didn’t give the letter another thought. I’d given it a shot, and I was done. But actually, I wasn’t done at all. In fact, I’d just begun, because she wrote back. I’m not a terribly emotional person, but when I read her response—when I read that my card had arrived on her real leap-day birthday, and that it was the only one she had received—I crumbled into the fetal position on my dirty Shome carpet. Sobbing, I read how much my words had encouraged her, how they’d given her hope, how they showed her God’s love in a real and powerful way. She said she was thankful to have me as a friend. A friend!

Never have I seen so clearly how such a small, seemingly insignificant act of obedience could reap such monumental blessings.

We have written back and forth for the past year. My letters are short. I never say anything profound. Sometimes I share a verse I’ve recently read, or I just ask her how she’s doing. No matter how lame the words seem to me, every time she writes back she tells me how thankful she is, how blessed she is to have me as her friend. To me, a friend is someone you eat dinner with or have over to your house. To her, a friend is someone who writes a letter every once in a while and tells her that she can get through this. Amazing.

Amazing that we have a God who can turn our paltry little offerings into more than we could ever imagine.